How are you today? I'm superfantastic.

What's next?

People keep asking me what I'm going to do in Pensacola. It's a fair question. After all, we move there in just over a month. (Yikes.) Will I get a teaching job?

I explain that no, I won't be looking for a teaching job since we'll only be there for six months. I tell them that I plan to pick up some tutoring kids. Maybe I'll do some subbing or temp work. All of this is true, but isn't the whole truth.

When we first started discussing Raj's options for the next couple of years, it was assumed that if he got accepted to flight school in Pensacola, I'd stay here and teach first semester. Then, when he started his assignment, I'd join him. The real discussions began when Raj was accepted to everything (rockstar) and was deciding between flight school or going directly to work with Marines. My input was that he should pick whichever he preferred, but I'd rather we not spend six months apart.

We talked about the possibility of me going with him and the reality of my limited employment options, given the short time we'd be there. And then I asked what Raj would think about me taking six months to try writing full-time. I'd have a chance to see whether, given the time and the freedom, I could get a lot done. If it turned out that I accomplished nothing with all of that time, I'd sign up to sub or temp. Raj said that was fine with him.

So that's the plan. And I'm excited about it. I'm getting the itch to start creating again now that school is winding down. It's a desire I haven't felt much of in quite a while, mostly I'm sure because I create plenty during the school year. As in, pretty much everything I use with kids. I teach a remedial class. There is no curriculum for high school reading. And the whole point of having such small classes here is so everything can be individualized for the needs of each particular student. I take that seriously. Meaning that I'm basically writing materials for six different classes, five days a week. When I get home, I don't want to create anymore, just consume. I'm looking forward to writing something that isn't meant to teach or assess.

But of course it's pretty scary as well. What if it turns out that, given all of that time, I just waste it and don't write anything anyway? What if I write and it's bad? And after August, when my teaching salary stops coming, I'll basically be a financial drain. I do intend to do some tutoring, but that's hardly going to equal pulling my financial weight. Hopefully, the writing will turn into money eventually, but that's not guaranteed and even if I did get a contract, wouldn't materialize for quite a while.

Which is part of why I don't tell people. It feels like I'd be saying that now that I landed a doctor, I intend to be a kept woman. Who needs to work? And it just sounds so flaky. I'm going to write! There's a whole Twitter account devoted to making fun of people who include the phrase "working on my novel" in tweets. Because, unless you're published already, there doesn't seem to be a way to say that you're working on your novel without sounding like a jackass.

Anne Lamott, in her own tweets, has taken to calling it "scribbling" rather than "writing" as a way to demystify the process, to free the rest of us from the notion that published authors write pristine first drafts. Maybe I should go with that when people ask me what I'll do in Florida. At least it sounds less pretentious.

So there you have it. In Florida, I'm going to scribble. And tutor and collect seashells for wedding centerpieces. But mostly scribble.

You getting so OLD!

Fortunately, I never had the kind of conversation poor Toula had with her father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. (Though had anyone offered to send me to Greece to find a husband, I would have accepted. Assuming all the while that there was little to no possibility of finding a husband while there, but a total likelihood of finding lots of things covered in feta.)

But I did get this reaction from my 19 year-old advisee to the news that I was engaged: Finally! You're HOW OLD?!?

She's a treat. Honestly though, 19 year-old me, while possessing the tact to not say it out loud, might very well have thought pretty much the same thing. And if you told 19 year-old me that she'd be 35 on her wedding day, she probably would wonder where her life went so horribly, horribly wrong.

I watched most of my college friends get married during or right after college. I went to nine weddings in one summer alone. By the time I graduated at 21, I was feeling like quite the old maid. Still, I have to give young me credit for realizing that while it all looked very appealing, it wasn't what she wanted right then. Getting married would almost certainly have meant settling down in Wisconsin and I wasn't interested in that. So when, after the first wedding I was a bridesmaid in, a friend said, "I want to get married!" I was at least able to make the important distinction, "I want to have a wedding!"

Then I moved to DC, where it would have been circus freak level unusual to have been married at 21. I wasn't an old maid after all! But there were these women I worked with who were 28 and 29 and single.The horror! Poor, poor them. Surely I'd never meet such a terrible fate.

Oh, to be young and smug. Fortunately, I matured along the way and while being single could be lonely, it didn't feel like the fate worse than death that young me would have thought it would. I took a lot of advantage of not being tied down to anyone or anything. I up and moved to New York because I wanted to. I spent a month in Europe. Jumping out of a plane probably would have been a horribly irresponsible thing for a mother of small children to do. As a single and childless 32 year-old, it was just a really good time.

Not that getting married younger and having kids already wouldn't have been an adventure. But I'm not sorry that it didn't happen for me because I've gotten to have lots of different adventures as a result. Maybe I spent an unreasonable amount of time figuring out who I am and what I want, but it does make a lot of good sense for me to have chosen a partner after having largely figured those things out. All of those years between 19 and 34 did a lot of making me who I am. Happily, who I am now is who Raj wants to marry. So it all worked out in the end.

Very Pinteresting: Wedding Edition

I've become a teensy bit addicted to the Weddings and Events section of Pinterest. Let us not speak of when this began, but know that it has certainly intensified since we began actually planning the wedding.

And I've found some really useful stuff there. Links to cheap vases you can buy in bulk. Flower and centerpiece ideas. A link to a Martha Stewart article that included the idea of using luminarias as decoration, which I would likely never have thought of on my own, despite the fact that they are huge in New Mexico (Raj's homeland) at Christmastime (the time of year we're getting married). Genius.

My very best find, courtesy of Pinterest, was the website A Practical Wedding, which I can just not recommend highly enough. Their tagline is: "weddings. minus the insanity, plus the marriage." Which is pretty much exactly what we're going for. A message they emphasize that works well for me is: don't let the Wedding Industrial Complex make you believe you MUST have/do/buy something you don't care about. For instance, I couldn't care less about having special toasting flutes for Raj and me. He doesn't care either, so we'll use the same champagne glasses everyone else does. Check that item off the list. I also love their Wedding Graduates posts, where women (mostly) share what they learned from their own weddings.

But of course not everything on Pinterest Weddings is so in keeping with my own personal taste. For instance, we will not be having any burlap, mustaches on sticks, or sand ceremony. There will be no mason jars. (I know, right? Am I sure we'll even be legally married?!?) I will not be wearing jewel-encrusted Christian Loubitin platform peep-toe heels. There will be NO CHALKBOARD PAINT WHATSOEVER. Also nothing heart-shaped because that is just not who we are. And no damask or toile because Raj hates them. Which is fine.

In general, I think people should do what they want for their weddings. Lots of people want mason jars and/or jewel-encrusted Christian Loubitin peep-toe platform heels to be part of their wedding and they should go ahead and have them. But I cannot support all bridal decisions so whole-heartedly. Which brings us to the following screed.

WOMEN OF PINTEREST:

That thing you want to decorate is the altar with two A's. Alter with an E is what you will do to your dress.

Please stop referring to your save the dates as your STDs. Ew.

Please, please, please stop referring to your bridesmaids as your BMs. Do you know what BM typically stands for? It's not pretty.

And really don't refer to them as or make them wear a bedazzed tank top calling them Brides Bitches. Or call them your 'maids. If you want bitches or maids, go to prison or a hotel.

And don't make them wear anything that makes them look like Bo Peep or a prostitute.

Also, that BRIDE track suit you want is good for, like, a day. Then what are you going to do with it?

Really, a unifying hair theme? (This one was braids. They'd all have braid-intensive hair. To unify.)

When you say PB, I think peanut butter, not Pottery Barn. So those PB filled votive candle holders sound not very flammable, but tasty.

Ok, fine this represents a matter of taste, but I find these deeply upsetting for reasons I do not fully understand. Maybe because they're pictured with a French pedicure, which I've always found similarly inexplicably creepy.

And finally, ladies, there's a lot of talk about MY wedding happening. Unless and until they change the law, you actually need two people for a wedding. So maybe at least pretend to think of it as OUR wedding. I'm speaking here to the gals planning actual and not hypothetical weddings on Pinterest. Sure, those of you thinking about a far off day with a mystery groom don't have to change the pronoun just yet.

In case you want to see, follow, or harshly judge my own pins, my Pinterest user name is Superfantastic. Naturally.